You get a lot of autonomy, great benefits, and you can actually measure the impact of your work on the business you’re promoting.

Marketing is becoming ever more measurable. With measurability comes accountability. Accountability leads to a meritocracy, where the best rise to the top regardless of how good they look in a suit.

I hear complaints from fellow entrepreneurs and hiring managers all the time – they say it’s getting almost as difficult to find good marketers as it is to find good developers.

I think the problem is actually worse with marketing. Unlike software development, where most unqualified people have the decency to give up or go to bootcamps to brush up on their skills, marketers have no shame. They will apply for literally any job, no matter how unqualified.

But say you wanted to get “qualified” …what would you do?

There’s no equivalent of a medical board, CFA qualification, or the bar exam for marketing. Most of the top people in marketing don’t have a marketing degree (shocking, right?). New techniques come out every week and old ones stop working (radio ads, anyone?). Online courses are more up to date and relevant, but there are thousands to choose from. It seems like these days every half-baked platform is offering a certification as a shady marketing ploy.

I get excited when I see this on your resume. I’d trust a marketer who understands Google Adwords with any other marketing channel because they are noticeably better at systematic thinking. This course was mandatory in my first job: you got fired if you didn’t pass in the first 90 days. That company got acquired by Adobe for $350m.> Learn more

2) Google Analytics

This course will help you get promoted. Seriously. Once you know how things are performing, you can do more of the good stuff, and less of the bad stuff. Then tell your boss (who doesn’t know how to use Google Analytics) about all the awesome stuff you did, with a big fat dollar amount next to it. Knowledge is power.

This course gets pretty technical. Most marketers aren’t. If you have this qualification, I immediately respect you. Unfortunately, you’ll have to get used to everyone pestering you to pull reports for them because they don’t know how. A good way to make friends and influence people.

3) Hubspot Inbound

Why chase your customers, when you can make them come to you? That’s a powerful concept. HubSpot pioneered ‘Inbound marketing’, and they’re worth $1.88 billion, so it’s worth listening to them. Blogging, Social Media, Landing pages and Email: this is what a well-rounded education looks like.

This is definitely a much easier course than Adwords and Analytics, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable. This is the most practically applicable course because you don’t need any money to do Inbound marketing. Perfect for marketers on small budgets.

4) Facebook Blueprint

The one thing about growing a company through inbound… it’s slow. The fastest way? Facebook ads. Start by reaching thousands of people for a couple bucks and only scale it up if it works for you. The sky is the limit; over 1 billion people use Facebook daily.

The amazing thing about Facebook Ads is the ability to learn quickly. You can test exactly what audiences (the targeting is super creepy by the way), value propositions and creative designs work the best. Even better, with all the extra traffic you’re driving, you can speed up learning on conversion, referral and retention tests too.

5) Infinite Skills Excel

One day you’ll come to realize that the World is run by people in suits using Microsoft Excel. Be one of those people and you too can rule the World. Seriously, something like 95% of the ‘advanced analysis’ I’ve done has been in Excel and it’s crucial for building campaigns too.

This is so important that we force everyone who applies to work at Ladder to complete a 1-hour excel test before they even qualify for an interview. That test has an 85% failure rate (even among more senior marketers). VLOOKUP and Pivot Tables are your new best friends, get acquainted.

Pro Tip: Don’t want to pay for this course, but do want to hone your Excel skills? Check out our Excel tutorial and the Excel test we ask every candidate to take.

6) Codecademy Make a Website

Believe it or not, but if you’re good at Excel, you’re pretty close to being able to code. And if you can code, you can do wondrous things. Add tracking to your website, make changes to landing pages, editing email designs; knowing a little bit of code can save you a lot of time, effort and money.

Once you know how websites are put together, you’ll be much more comfortable making SEO, conversion and retention recommendations. You’ll also be better at figuring out what’s wrong with your analytics tracking (a timeless skill). Plus being able to code is just cool.

7) Canva Design School

A big part of marketing is having an eye for design. If you can make visually appealing ads, websites and emails, you’ll go far. Even if it’s not you doing the designing, you will still spend an inordinate amount of time approving the designs of others. Don’t be ‘that guy’. Educate yourself.

The good thing is that you don’t need to go to art school or spend any time in hipster coffee shops. It’s really quite simple to nail the basics and tools like Canva make it easy to produce professional quality designs, even if your teacher told you in school that you weren’t the ‘creative type’.

8) Startup Institute / General Assembly

The vast majority of our hires have come from Startup Institute or General Assembly. We teach courses at Startup Institute in New York. Our entire team is deeply ingrained into the Startup Institute ecosystem, and we’re slowly doing the same with General Assembly.

Why?

A few reasons:

Willingness to take risks – quitting your job to go back to get educated on the skills needed for a modern digital workplace shows the kind of gutsy behavior we value at Ladder.

Making a big bet on themselves – many students of SI and GA are career changers. They were previously working at large corporations, financial institutions, or industries they didn’t want to be in. They took a big bet by taking on further education to pivot their careers.

Practical experience – SI and GA allow students to get into the weeds with actual companies and actual projects, letting them learn how to run ads, create landing pages, run conversion tests, etc…

This doesn’t just apply to Startup Institute and General Assembly, but to all bootcamps that focus on training people for the type of environment we thrive in. We work with startups and large businesses with the kind of lean methodology these bootcamps teach, so it only makes sense that we understand the value of an SI/GA graduation certificate.

9) Google Tag Manager Fundamentals

Google Tag Manager is one of the most important tools we use every single day with clients and for Ladder. It’s the single unifying tool that enables us to use a bunch of different portions of our marketing tech stack without having to manually change website code.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) allows you to add all the different scripts and tags needed for things like Google AdWords conversion tracking, Facebook Pixels, tools like VWO, and much, much more. All of this is done with just a single script added to a website, enabling you to easily add and run all other tags via GTM’s user interface.

Any candidate that has gone through the Google Tag Manager Fundamentals course immediately signals that they understand the need for optimizing the way tech and advertising tools are implemented onto a website. They’ve learned how to use GTM and gone through examples on setting up tools and scripts with Tag Manager. That’s one bit of training that helps immensely during our onboarding week.

10) Google eCommerce Analytics Training

eCommerce companies have become a major part of our client base at Ladder, which has presented some unique challenges that we’ve tackled over the last year. One of the biggest things we’ve done in order to adapt so we can best serve our eCommerce clients is to expand our own learnings.

To that end, we contacted Brainlabs, an expert agency at eCommerce, and had them teach us how to take full advantage of Google Shopping ad campaigns.

Along the same vein, we’re now looking at the eCommerce training offered by Google as a potential high-value certification that would signal a candidate’s capabilities with eCommerce clients. It’s a course that gives both theoretical and practical applications of eCommerce analytics with a focus on using data to drive revenue and ROI.

11) W3Schools Web Dev Certifications

If you’ve gotten to the point where Codecademy doesn’t have everything you need, and you want to start diving deeper into coding for marketing, then it’s time to start W3Schools’ tutorials for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Bootstrap, Angular, SQL, etc… While these tutorials are still on the more basic side, W3Schools provides a broader depth of tutorials that can help you expand your coding skillset into areas that are critical for product marketing.

This can be anything from learning SQL so you can pull custom data queries from your advanced analytics tool of choice (Mode Analytics, for example) to learning Bootstrap and Angular, two common frameworks on which many web apps are built. Being able to at least understand the underlying code that makes an app run is invaluable for understanding how marketing campaigns can be informed by the product you’re trying to promote.

12) HootSuite Social Media Marketing

While we typically err on the side of paid social media marketing, it’s important to also understand the marketing fundamentals behind each of the top social platforms, from Facebook and Twitter, to LinkedIn to Pinterest. Being knowledgeable in the use of these platforms from a marketing perspective will help you become better at targeting audiences and advertising to them. So even if you never end up running an organic social media campaign, you’ll still find a lot of value in the HootSuite training program.

That’s it: our shortlist of the qualifications we truly respect. There are of course plenty of other courses out there, many of them good. Maybe some of them are better than these courses.

But really it’s not worth wasting your time going overboard with these. Certifications can help, but they’re just a start. The real juicy tricks, tips and techniques can only be learned by doing.

So get this out of the way and convince someone to let you run real campaigns for them. That’s when the magic starts to happen.

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